ABSTRACT
This chapter examines aspects of southern Mesopotamia’s research history as examples of how theories were put into practice by varied investigators. It reviews of southern Mesopotamia’s physical form and history before moving on to consider the ways in which theory and data were and are being related through the work of researchers operating within different schools of thought. Fluctuations in rainfall both in southern Mesopotamia and the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers can produce severe droughts and destructive floods depending on the year. The conceptual framework that channeled excavations in Mesopotamia throughout most of the nineteenth century treated material culture as a set of distinct objects. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the goals of exploring Mesopotamian sites had changed from anchoring Biblical accounts in physical remains to describing the roots of civilizations recorded in that text. Culture and history were dramatically redefined in Adams’s research in comparison to earlier culture history investigations in southern Mesopotamia.
